


he who holds the heart of a dragon

by brosura



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: -to the tune of the dragon tales theme song- dragon boyes dragon boyes, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst Lite, Angst with a Happy Ending, Dragons, Implied/Referenced Torture, Light Angst, M/M, come get ur dragon boyes, nothing intense though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-09
Updated: 2018-10-09
Packaged: 2019-07-28 12:47:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,983
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16241924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brosura/pseuds/brosura
Summary: The thought that he might have made a mistake freeing the dragon crossed his mind as it shrugged off the remaining netting, stretching its wings to reveal that Noctis had severely underestimated the creature’s sheer size. The sentiment passed quickly when it rounded on him not with violence and rage, but with gratitude in the low rumbles of a content cat. It nudged him with its head - nearly the size of Noct’s torso alone - and presented the wristband Noctis had given it only moments ago held gingerly between sharp teeth.“Oh?” Noctis said, dumbstruck in the face of a dragon. “Do you want it?”The rumbling grew louder and Noctis read hope in its big eyes.“You can have it, I suppose.”





	he who holds the heart of a dragon

**Author's Note:**

> here it is! my finished piece for the promptis ever after zine! im so grateful to them for having me!!
> 
> anyway, enjoy enjoy the dragon boye

Noctis remembers everything about the day he met Prompto.

The memory is still fresh, one of the many he holds close and one of the many that hold Prompto in them. The brightness of Prompto’s smile, the earnestness of his expression, excitement written so clearly on the lines of his face that Noctis could read it at a glance. How Prompto didn’t shrink away from Noctis like all the other staff in the castle.

That instead, Prompto had rushed to greet Noctis as if meeting an old friend and not the prince that the stable master had to stiffly remind Prompto he served.

He remembers finding it odd and then charming because he also remembers being lonely before Prompto, remembers desperately wanting for a friend.

And he found one in Prompto. Simple and easy, the way all things were easy with Prompto.

Ignis and Gladio had thought otherwise at first. They disliked the stable boy who was too familiar, too casual with the prince. He remembers the sharpness of their expressions whenever they came to collect Noctis from whatever little adventure the two of them had embarked upon.

But Prompto was a hard person to dislike and Ignis and Gladio’s sharpness towards him had dulled soon enough. Noctis isn’t sure it was all his doing, but he knows the changes his oldest friends saw in him helped his new friend’s case.

He remembers being withdrawn before, overwhelmed with the weight of his responsibilities. He snuck out often, sometimes with Ignis as a reluctant partner but more often wandering off alone to roam the forests surrounding the city and breathe air that wasn’t heavy with expectation.

With Prompto, he found he could never wander far. It was difficult to be alone in the woods when there was someone that greeted Noctis with a warm smile whenever he passed by with some mumbled excuse of seeing to the chocobos. Someone who waited patiently until Noctis ran out of excuses and then stopped using them entirely because it was difficult to stay away from someone like Prompto.

He remembers everything feeling lighter after he asked Prompto to be his friend. The day to day troubles of princehood seemed less insurmountable when he knew that afterwards, Prompto would take him to buy questionable meat skewers from some questionable street vendor to eat on a worn stone wall overlooking the pastures.

He remembers smiling more, avoiding things less. He remembers the way Ignis and Gladio seemed to relax, seemed relieved at the changes in him. They started approaching the two of them in the midst of some truancy and adventure with half-fond sighs of exasperation instead of the sharp, tight lines of disapproval. He remembers Prompto offering them questionable meat skewers, too.

Prompto is a hard person to dislike. He’s an easy person to love.

So it was easy for Noctis to remember everything about the day he met Prompto. His blue eyes sparkling with the high noon sun. The light glinting off his golden hair. How his joy seemed infectious at the time, made Noct’s lungs fill with something new and exciting and so overwhelming that the thin black band around Prompto’s wrist that bore the crest of the royal family, of _Noct’s_ family, was an omittable detail.

He remembers how he lost the wristband, too. And looking back, he can’t understand how he’d missed it, perhaps only to protect himself from the inconvenience of the truth.

After all, Noctis remembers the legends.

Not much of them, but enough to understand that when he came across a dragon on one of his old lonely forest wanderings - _scales and feathers gold and glimmering, every inch boasting the presence of a creature of legend in spite of the still bleeding wounds made by some hunter’s spiked net_ \- any ancestor of his would have killed it.

The Caelum family was long-lived and storied, many of those stories drenched in the blood of dragons from a time when the world was crueler and few lived to be as old as Noctis was that day in the forest. And their name was revered enough to have prophecies built around it, some still hanging over the heads of every child born to the throne.

One such prophecy spoke of a Caelum, a king that held a dragon’s heart, leading Lucis to new prosperity.

He remembered it in the moment, sword heavy at his hip, because dragons were very rare and he understood immediately that any ancestor of his would have killed it simply for the chance at glory. And now, the opportunity to be a king of legend lay before him.

Noctis spent a moment with his hand on his blade and the prophecy wrapped around his fingers.

But the dragon looked at him, dark blue eyes wild and desperate with a fear that felt intimately human and so poorly hidden by bared, gleaming teeth.

“I won’t hurt you,” he’d said instead, approaching the dragon slowly and hoping it could understand.

It was the truth, but he wasn’t upset by the suspicious look he got. He didn’t understand why his next instinct was to unclip his wristband and lay it before the dragon. It felt foolish - what could a dragon want with it? - but the creature seemed to calm, if only out of curiosity.

“It’s something important to me,” he had said and meant it. Gifts from his father were always important, no matter how small.

The dragon tilted its head, sniffing at the band and allowing Noctis close enough to cut at the ropes of the net. The dragon tensed at the sound of his blade, but rumbled with something like relief as it felt Noctis pull them away.

The thought that he might have made a mistake freeing the dragon crossed his mind as it shrugged off the remaining netting, stretching its wings to reveal that Noctis had severely underestimated the creature’s sheer _size._ The sentiment passed quickly when it rounded on him not with violence and rage, but with gratitude in the low rumbles of a content cat. It nudged him with its head - nearly the size of Noct’s torso alone - and presented the wristband Noctis had given it only moments ago held gingerly between sharp teeth.

“Oh?” Noctis said, dumbstruck in the face of a dragon. “Do you want it?”

The rumbling grew louder and Noctis read hope in its big eyes.

“You can have it, I suppose.”

And it had flown off, leaving Noctis with a story he dare not repeat that he barely believed himself. He’d told some tale about losing his wristband while climbing a tree that no one seemed pleased with, but no one was upset about, either.

He didn’t realize what it meant when it reappeared a few weeks later, wrapped around Prompto’s wrist.

And he didn’t realize what it meant when Prompto left without so much as a goodbye a month ago.

It had hurt, but he’d tried to protect himself from that, too. The staff in the Citadel left all the time, for travel or other work. And Noctis remembered that Prompto spoke often about the strangeness of the city, the confinement of four walls. Noctis reasoned that he must have left to work with the chocobos where they were raised instead of the castle’s stables.

Prompto always seemed happiest when there was nothing between him and the sky.

But Noctis also remembered the feeling of lips on his, feather light, the way Prompto seemed to soar when he’d smiled at Noctis, bathed in moonlight on the roof of the stables.

He had thought that Prompto was happy at his side, too.

He didn’t realize what everything meant until he’d been sent with a group of his guard to investigate the Gralean Keep to the north. It was a thing of Niflheim, supposedly inactive, but farmers near the old stone structure reported strange lights and eerie sounds - sometimes tortured screams, sometimes brutal roars - and the coming and going of soldiers in the night.

He didn’t realize what everything meant until he’d arrived to find it burning, covered in dark stains that could have been ash or blood.

He didn’t realize what everything meant until now, face to face with the gleaming fangs of a dragon.

The same one from the woods, gold and glimmering, speckled with blood and sores as it eyes his company with the desperation of an animal cornered.

His men whisper behind him, nervous but with anticipation underneath. To them, the dragon is injured and weak and a Caelum, a King of Lucis stands with them. They think that the prophecy hangs over them, that they will bear witness to the coming of a new era.

They don’t understand that this isn’t just a dragon. They don’t know what Noctis knows.

They don’t know that Prompto is an easy person to love, that he looks at the sky like it’s home and traces the stars as if he’s travelled through them. They don’t know that he can name each of the chocobos in the stables and pays too much for questionable meat skewers. They don’t know that Prompto had a smile on his face and a thin black band on his wrist when he met Noctis for the first time.

They don’t know that Prompto _is_ this dragon.

“Prompto,” he breathes at the weight of the revelation, as each strange quirk, each coincidence slots into place to reveal the picture before him. That he had been so desperate to ignore each difficult truth, so set on protecting himself, that he’d left Prompto to suffer alone in captivity for almost a month. The dragon’s ears twitch at the sound, so Noctis pleads again, louder, _“Prompto.”_

He can hear the confusion behind him, but it doesn’t matter as the dragon - as _Prompto_ \- hesitates, ears twitching forward and his snarl relaxing for a moment before his lips curl up again. Noctis steps towards him.

“It’s alright,” he says around the choked sob in his throat as Prompto shrinks from him, snarling but distinctly afraid, and Noctis can see cruel red welts along his side. He swallows down the horror, the question of _“What did they do to you?”_ and lets out a shaking laugh as he remembers when they met for the first time, the very first time. “I won’t hurt you.”

Prompto twitches again and he looks so small for a creature so big as Noctis reaches for the band around his wrist. It’s a different one from before, one his father had given him with a smart, fond comment about climbing trees, but it’s still honest when he holds it out and says, “It’s something important to me.”

Prompto pauses, hesitates, but cranes his long neck forward to sniff at the band. There is a long, tense moment between them, when Noctis thinks that maybe whatever happened to Prompto was terrible enough to make him forget everything he was, everything they had.

“You’re important to me,” he prays in the face of that fear.

Something like a sob shudders through Prompto and Noctis watches as his huge, knowing eyes brighten with relief, with recognition, with disbelief and gratitude and _love_ and many other things. For a moment, Prompto seems to soar in the flickering light of the fires behind him. Then he shudders again, some inconceivably old magic rushing visibly through him as his form shifts and changes.

“I’m here,” Noctis says, shaking with relief. He puts the wristband back on as he steps toward Prompto. He doesn’t care to offer something so little to him. Noctis wants to give him everything, for the rest of his life. He reaches out to Prompto, whose body is still alight with fading bolts of magic. His hair is gold and his blue eyes sparkle in the setting sun. “Let’s go home, Prompto.”

And, not for the first time, Prompto takes Noct’s hand.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for the read! it's foolish of me to make any promises considering i Am Drowning in my other WIPs and zines but,,, do know that this is not the end of the dragon boye lore....
> 
> ALSO FOR MORE DRAGON BOYE LORE/BeAUTIFUL IMAGES PLEASE CHECK OUT [PIKA'S DODOLES](https://burbled-xv.tumblr.com/post/178905911037/dragon-boyes-hello-here-are-a-bunch-of) IM STILL SHOUTING ABOUT IT
> 
> anyway, if you liked the dragon boyes, please feel free to give me a lil yell in the comments, on my [tumblr](http://brosura.tumblr.com/) or my [twitter](https://twitter.com/bigkatsanctuary)!!


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